Spring 1999, Volume 16.3

Fiction

Marco Morrone

Blood is Their Secret

Marco Morrone's story "Blood is Their Secret" is the first chapter
of an historical novel describing the 1890 assassination of the New Orleans chief of
police and the Mafia hysteria which followed. Mr. Morrone recently completed his Master's
degree in History at the University of Texas. He lives in San Francisco and teaches
English at Redwood High School. This is his first published work.

The boy woke, having been dreaming in English. In the dream his parents were alive and
the three of them were sailing away from land on a ship. They spoke English too, in the
dream, but he was too young to speak himself, and so he cried. "There, there,"
they said to him, and to each other: "he cries too, for leaving." They held him
up so he could look back at the land, but it looked plain and grey and less like itself
than did the sea, which rolled away all around them like great green hills beneath clouds
of white spray.

He had not been asleep long, but it had not been his intention to fall asleep at all;
he had intended to feign sleep for an hour and then dress and sneak out of the house to
meet up with his gang. He considered not going at all now that he would be late, but
realized that if he did not go he would be too anxious to sleep in any case, and so he
wormed out from beneath the thin blanket which covered him in his pallet. He could hear it
raining outside, as it had been for almost a week, and though it was not cold out from
under the blanket he shivered as he pulled on his clothes thinking of the long walk in the
rain at night. In the closeness of the small room, he could feel the sounds of even his
most careful movements reaching out like long quiet arms to where the others lay sleeping,
but they did not stir, their bodies too grateful for the time stolen away from work and
resting greedily in the dark peacefulness of the balmy, rainy night.

Dressed but for his shoes, he crept out of the sleeping room of people. He noticed that
Nino's place across from him was empty, but he did not find this strange or alarming. Many
times he had woken up in the night to hear Nino either leaving or arriving, so that his
nocturnal movements had by now taken on some aspect of daytime normality. Once or twice
Nino had caught him looking and scowled at him and afterward the boy had tried hard to
forget the entire incident so as not to cause trouble. But another time Nino had come over
when he noticed that his arrival had awoken the young one and he leaned close, his man's
whiskers hovering close to the boy's face like the fur of an animal in the darkness, and
from amid a slow, strange smile he had said, "just between us,
ah?"withdrawing afterwards without a sound, the white of his teeth and eyes
receding into the shadowy recesses of the small room like something slipping below the
surface of a deep pool.

The boy stepped into the main room, where Anna cooked and they all ate and sometimes
sat around the table and laughed and had a glass of wine. Nino always brought the wine,
which was too expensive, but he managed to force some on everyone anyway and they were all
together then. It's a shotgun shack, Frank had said of the place. The three of them were
all brothers and sisters, but he wasn't; he was the one they took in.

Passing out of the kitchen and into the small entryway on the other side, he slipped on
his shoes and set out into the rain, which had begun to retreat into the low, wet clouds
that had been clinging to the rooftops of the city for days. On such a night with no moon
it would be hard to find his way in this part of town where there were few electric
lights, and even then only at street corners. As the rain let up, it drew the smell out of
everything around. He imagined finding his way along like an animal, like a lion. He could
smell the earthy rot of wet leaves on the ground and the soaked wood of the plank
sidewalks and the night itself too, which always made him think of smoke. He made his way
along the alley that connected the house to the main street, creeping through the mud like
a lion, listening for everything around him. In the unsettled outskirts of the city itself
he knew there were lions, or at least deer and boars and wild dogs. Some of the men in the
neighborhood had been hunting out there and brought them back a deer once, with skin so
soft the boy couldn't imagine how it had held the deer together in the first place. How
easy it must be to kill a deer, he remembered thinking, just a touch on the skin and it
all comes right apart.

When he reached the intersection of the alley and the main street, he and the road
around him were partially illuminated at a distant angle by the streetlight that hung over
an intersection a block down to his right. The street was empty and its cavernous, muddy
ruts had filled with rainwater, reflecting only glimmers in the slanting, swaying electric
light. He kicked along, following a loose order of streets and alleyways which would bring
him to the meeting place. The roads had become treacherous and slippery, in places
bog-like in this section of the city where none of it was paved. He had been on some of
the concrete roads in the Garden District and found them fast and wonderful. The cobbled
streets too fascinated him, on dry days the unpredictable clip-clop sound of hooves on the
irregular texture of them, though he himself had turned an ankle once running away from a
shopkeeper and had a good beating as a result. But a rainy week washed these better
streets full of mud as well, so that it was slow going everywhere. Even the streetcars
crawled carefully along their tracks, the big teams that pulled them scrabbling and
slogging for footing in the swampy ground, baying and snorting their frustration to one
another. Horses have a rich animal smell, he thought, one that lingers in the street after
they are gone, and lions can smell it a mile away. Where do the horses go at night, he
wondered, when the streetcars stop running? Do they lean their bodies up against barn
doors, catching a rest from the day's work, or do they run around free? Do they run-around
knock-around at all hours kicking up mud on the back streets of the Quarter like him,
burning away the night?

When he arrived, only two others had even shown up at all. "Late," said one.

"Probably fell asleep," said the other.

"No," the boy said. "They were up. I had to wait."

"Sure," said the first. The other smiled.

They were not his favorites, the ones who had shown up, but they were the ones he would
have expected to come even if the others didn't. And there was also a frantic, hopeful
energy that came from being three and not one, and soon they were running along the muddy
streets together laughing and pitching rocks at storefronts. They passed an uninhabited
space that set apart several buildings, what might have been a park or a small green had
it not been piled high with garbage and even some of the collected muck from the
neighborhood privies. In the weak white glow of a streetlight some blocks away, the foul
steam rising from the enormous heap of refuse made it look like the smoldering remnant of
something that had burned down. They stared at it a moment and when they heard a rustling
off to one side, they hunted up some rocks to shower at a few rats which had allowed
themselves to be discovered.

Further on, they eventually passed into the grander residential section of the Quarter,
where the old three- and four-story houses rose narrow and ornamental like castle towers.
Many had their own electric lights, usually one outside on a second or third balcony,
which gave the impression that the house itself remained on guard even as its inhabitants
slept. They paused before a particular three-story brick fortress perched at the rear of
its lot with a small garden in front rather than in back, as was the style. The boy's two
fellows agreed that it was a good house for robbing.

"This one," stated the first.

"Sure," said the other.

"What do you say, then?" the first fellow said to the boy, who had not
spoken.

"I don't know," he said.

"He doesn't know," said the first.

"No, ah?" said the second.

"What makes it so good?" said the boy.

"What makes it?" said the first.

"He's afraid."

"There's a treethere, a climbing tree on the side."

"It goes up to the second-floor. Easy."

"Is easy."

The boy looked over into the shadowy left corner of the lot and saw a shade tree
standing at attention beside the house, one low bough riding up alongside a small tract of
the second-floor balcony.

"So?" said the first fellow.

"He's afraid," said the second.

The boy said nothing.

"He's afraid," the second fellow said again.

"Maybe not," said the first.

"He's"

"Piss on you," said the boy, and he and the second fellow turned and stared
at one another eyeless and faceless, each unable to discern much beyond the thin outline
of a child's body opposite him in the low yellow of the distant electric light on the
second floor balcony, where the tree limb reached.

But before the feeling of the moment had faded from the front of their minds, the boy
found himself running. He crashed numbly through the garden in front of the house and
misjudged the tree itself, hitting it first and hard with his face and chest and knocking
some of the wind out of him, but his right hand had taken hold of a branch, and soon after
the left, and so before the anger had drained away he had climbed head-high into the tree.
When he had made it as far as the bough that reached out toward the balcony like a bent
arm he looked down and saw the first fellow hissing encouragement up at him and the second
fellow standing and watching from a short distance away. The bough itself left a greater
distance between the tree and the balcony than it had appeared from below, but as he came
closer to the light he gained confidence in the sure placement of his hands and feet, and
so he made it up and over the ornate iron railing with little further difficulty.

On the balcony, the boy took a deep breath to settle himself and then looked out from
his new vantage point. He saw that above them, a watery pink moon now floated in and out
of the high grey sky, and that like the rain before it, some of the darkness had lifted
away. Standing on the cool smooth stone, he was struck by the chaotic beauty of the muddy
street, with its brightening constellation of rain-filled pools, each reflecting
faithfully the passing glimpses of the moon above. Below him, he noticed the first fellow
starting to scramble up the tree.

Turning around, he tip-toed several steps to one of the glass doors which ran the
length of the balcony. Pressing his face close to the glass, he could see through the
gauze of a curtain the stark interior landscape of a drawing room larger perhaps than his
own entire house. Although the details within remained hidden in shadows, he imagined a
kingly richness for all the furnishings, and an appropriate nobility for the masters of
the house, whom he conceived to be the most wealthy and powerful people in the city. His
fellow had by this time made it as far as the bough, but had paused at the disconcerting
gap between the tree and the railing. The boy reached over to help him, but as soon as he
felt the other's weight come into his own hands he heard a noise behind him and to the
left, and immediately his hands were unweighted and his fellow began sliding back down the
tree, clawing away for a grip as he went. The boy watched, powerless, as his fellow
descended the tree far faster than he had intended and landed in a heap. But another noise
behind him, this one louder and more distinct than the firsta door openingtore
his attention back to the balcony on which he stood.

At the opposite end beside an open glass door he saw a man in his sleeping clothes
holding a long-barrelled hunting rifle. Part of the boy considered a quick leap over the
railing and a return down the way he had come, but fear had come between his mind and
body. And so he stood, motionless, facing the man at the other end of the balcony who
simply stared back at him, perhaps uncertain of what action to take next since his
presence alone had apparently not been sufficient. After the shock had passed, the boy
began to notice that the man was not as he might have imaginedthat he was instead
somewhat old and stooped, and that his head seemed shriveled beneath his white wispy
hairs. The rifle itself looked dusty and ill-used, as if it had been lifted only moments
before from above the mantle. Even in the midst of his fear, the boy entertained the
thought that perhaps the figure before him was not in fact the master of the house but a
kind of scarecrow, an outrageous statue employed to terrify intruders, or else to mock
them.

But the statue began grumbling to life suddenly, some speech gathering in its stony
throat, its face flushing with anger, and the boy rediscovered movement of his limbs and
began backing away toward the railing and the possibility of flight.

"Goddam dagoes," the man spat.

The words slipped inside the boy like a long thin knife, and from the deep place where
they touched a hot liquid poured out into his body. He stopped backing away and took up
standing again. The man came a step closer to him and still the boy did not move, except
for the tensing of his arms and shoulders, the clenching of his fists; he understood that
he had begun readying himself, and that when the man got close enough, he would lash out
at him with all the blind, coiling strength he had. But as the man reached out for the
boy, the rifle clambered out of his other hand and the butt-end struck the stone floor
hard, and an instant later the balcony exploded in a flash of light and noise which shook
the air around them and left a screaming sound in the boy's ears.

It was only after the echo of the shot had dissipated that the boy realized he had not
been wounded or killed. He wanted to curse the man, to run at him headlong and deliver his
full fury, but he found that this power had left him as quickly as it had come. His limbs
were moving now and so he began a speedy descent, pausing at the base of the tree on
instinct to look back at his enemy, who had not yet moved again since the sound of the
shot and who stood looking down at the boy in horror at the suppleness and vitality of
him, at his movement.

His fellows were long gone and so the boy wandered home alone, his mind busy with
remembering and his spirit full of the warm life that comes from having gotten out of a
close spot. As he neared his own neighborhood, the boy set about planning his stealthy
return to his own sleeping place, pausing to wonder if he would be returning after Nino,
and if he might accidentally wake him up when he arrived just to see the look he would
have on his face. This image dreamed him back past the streetlights and into the Italian
section of the Quarter, with its attendant darkness.

But where he expected to find dead calm, he found stirrings of wakefulness. Through the
shutters of some of the houses he even saw the flickering orange of oil lights. He
wondered at first if it were near dawn and some of them had started the day over already,
but the moon was still high and the now cloudless blue-black night deep and full behind
it.

He could not quite get his mind around the activity he was witnessing. He thought at
first the rifle shot must have woken them, that he and his fellows had been found out,
that people were out looking for them even. But none of this made sense or would explain
why so many lights were burning at this hour of the night and the strangeness of it
chilled him, and in recollecting his adventure on the balcony he suddenly could not
remember whether or not he had been brave. The feelings of the time seemed remote and
untouchable, and sank deeper within his current confusion as he approached his own house
and noticed the familiar patterns of light lurking behind the shutters of the side window.

He plodded the few remaining steps to the door, resigned to punishment: a whipping, he
imagined, from either Frank or Anna or both of them depending on how angry and how tired
they each were. But he found it difficult to dread this, preoccupied as he was by the
general failure of his own enterprise and how it swallowed up without remorse the
excitement of the evening he had just passed.

As he set foot on the front step he paused, hearing the sound of voices within and some
of them not of the house. His own patchwork of concerns tumbled from his mind as he eased
the outside door open and padded on cat-paws to the door which separated the entryway from
the kitchen and he stopped there to listen more closely. He could tell they were men
talking, sitting around the kitchen table probably, and that Nino was one of them, but
they kept their voices low. Between himself and the voices he could hear Anna banging
around in the kitchen, cooking or cleaning up or going through the motions of one or the
other. In straining to hear the nature of the conversation, he noticed that he had been
leaning his weight up against the door, so he withdrew quietly out of nervousness and then
watched in horror as the door fell open from its latch by several inches.

He felt certain that discovery was imminent. He held his breath and the idea pushed
forward from the back of his mind that if they were indeed discussing his whereabouts that
any disruption in the rooma noise outside, the creak of a floorboardwould
instantly call them to action. And yet a moment later Anna passed by the doorway and
failed to notice him. He exhaled carefully and for a few long moments could not think
about anything at all but the fact that he did not know what was going on.

Minutes passed, and as he became accustomed to the open door and the idea that he had
not been found out, he worked his way forward patiently until, while remaining concealed
in the shadows, he could see most of the room on the other side of the door and hear much
better. The men had on heavy, muddy boots and hulked around the small square table which
they had pulled over to the far side of the room. There were two of them besides Nino, but
you could have made a third from the thickness of this pair. Tracks of fresh black mud
crisscrossed the pale wood floor and Anna was mad, he could see, but not at that. She
paced the small cooking area picking things up and putting them down as if she were
looking for something but not finding it or anything else she wanted. She had a pan
heating up on the stove, and though she did not seem to be listening to the conversation
in the other part of the room, now and again one of the men would say something and she
would stop what she was doing and stare off and shake her head and mutter to herself and
then carry on with her distracted rituals.

"We want to get out of these clothes," one of the pair of men announced. A
moment passed and no one at the table said anything further and no one moved.

"Your sister is angry," ventured the second man.

Nino chuckled. "Your brother is a genius," he said to the first,
"another Da Vinci."

"Another Brutus," said the first. Nino laughed.

"I know what you say," the second man replied.

"You do?" asked the first.

"Yes," said the second.

"Yes, I suppose you do." "Oh he knows," said Nino. "He's very
smart. Watch him. He may discover something at any moment. A light bulb, a bicycle, a
flying machine."

Another quiet moment passed and the first one said, "We should change out of these
clothes, and the boots."

"Go then," said Nino, but again no one moved. He smiled and shook his head.
"You'd think you would be used to it by now," he said.

"This isn't meant to be funny, this business. Are you" the second
started to say, but a look from Nino stopped him. The first man's hand had begun to
tremble just a bit on the table, his nail tapping on the wood, and he took it off and let
his arm hang loose at his side.

"You'd think you'd be an expert," Nino said, reclining in his chair somewhat.
"A man is just an animal with a mind in his head. And this one, a real animal. This
one a wolf."

"Still, are you" the second one said, "don't you think they'll
come for us?"

"Are you afraid?" Nino asked.

"Are you not?"

"Oh yes, I am terrified," Nino said. "There will be trouble. But the
time for this bellyaching was before."

"They will think it was Italians who did this," said the first man.

"He is right," said the second.

"A good point. You are both top students," Nino said.

"You are mad," said the first.

"Truly," said the second, "you are a crazy dreamer, and you have doomed
us all."

At this Nino rose from his chair, and in the anticipation of what might happen next the
boy moved forward into the light that shone through from the kitchen into his hiding
place. He had been standing there for no more than a moment or two before he realized that
Anna was looking in his direction and that she had in fact trained her full concentration
upon him. He thought about how she always took care of everything and wondered if she
would take care of this new trouble as well, but then he could feel from the way her eyes
held him hard and tight like he was her own son that the distance between them had
suddenly collapsed and that they were both on the outside looking in at the world of men.

"What's done is done," said Nino. The men sat still and watched him with
patient, almost inanimate attention. "You try and hold the truth of this thing tight
in the center of you like a small stone. But you can't. It breaks apart and pumps out into
your body like blood. And it is all your own and you belong to it. This blood is your
secretits power comes from both its keeping, and its revelation."

The men were silent, and the boy too had fallen into a kind of trance, as he often did
when they sat around some nights and listened to the old men telling stories. And he felt
as if this time the hearing had drawn him up into the telling until he had become part of
it, until he and his life had become part of something altogether different. He felt
himself sliding from his own world into this other, down the warm, sandy slope which he
now saw had always separated the two.

In the midst of his descent, Anna snatched him by the arm and pulled him out into the
kitchen before the men, and she and Nino stared at one another over him. The boy looked
with curiosity on the two strange men sitting at the table. They had hard faces and
massive bodies, but there was something soft around the edges of them, their hands and
shoulders, but perhaps this was just in comparison to Nino, who stood tall and had a metal
certainty to every turn of his body. He might have been a soldier under his skin, or a
boxer or a ball player, the boy thought. The strange men stared at the boy with a look of
blank incomprehension. Nino looked down with a kind face for a moment, but then he
returned his attention to his older sister, who seemed poised to lecture him as she often
did in her quick, sharp phrases. But she did not. She and Nino looked at one another with
the dark eyes of their parents and the boy could feel her hand and arm tremble through the
firm hold she had on his shoulder. She moved the boy forward a half-step towards Nino and
held him there and said nothing. The boy saw Nino reach out and pull stray curls of
black-brown hair away from where they had fallen across her face and then touch her with
the palm of his hand on the cheek. Anna reached up and took Nino's hand in her own and
kissed the knuckles on his hand hard, so that it left a red mark. Then she turned around
and went back to the other side of the room, leaving the boy where he stood.

Nino squatted down so that he was looking up into the boy's eyes. They stared at each
other in silence for a moment. The boy did not know if something was expected of him at
this point, but he had no idea what he might provide if this were the case and so the only
option seemed to be silence.

"Well then," Nino said finally, "where have you been?"

"Out."

"Out. I see."

"An old man tried to shoot me when I broke into his house," the boy said.

"But you have escaped uninjured, it seems."

"Yes."

"Very good. That is more than I can say for our party, in which one of our number
received a cut on the hand." One of the men shifted in his seat and the boy noticed
that the man had been holding his left hand under the table. "One of the other boys
fell out of a tree," the boy said.

"And was he injured?" Nino asked.

"I don't know. He left while the old man was shooting at me. The man called me
goddam dago."

At the hearing of this Nino smiled a thin smile that had nothing to do with his
customary humorous demeanor and shook his head slightly from side to side and the boy
realized that Nino was a man capable of killing another man.

"You are very brave," Nino said.

"I know," the boy said, and Nino smiled a grand smile this time, and the men
behind him turned to each other and nodded and laughed.

Nino's hand fell upon the boy's shoulder. "Then you will hold the truth here, like
a brave man does," he said, touching the boy in the chest.

The boy nodded, though at the same moment he found himself flooded with self-doubt; he
was uncertain he would ever be able to live in the world of men, to know the truth as they
knew it. Just then the outside door to the house opened and closed and a moment later
Frank came into the kitchen and everyone in the room turned to look at him.

"There has been a murder," Frank said. "An important man, I think. And
many arrests. But they say they are looking for the Mantrangas. The Mantrangas! Why would
they do such a thing?"

The boy looked at Nino and saw that his face held a plain and terrible look, a look
that seemed composed of equal parts sadness and amusement but was topped by eyes as cold
as the rain.

"I don't know Frank," Nino said. Nino would not tell Frank the truth, the boy
knew this. Anna knew everything but Frank did not; she kept them apart and made everything
work out alright.

"You've been out for some time," Nino said. "Please. We are anxious to
hear."

Nino pulled up a chair for his brother at the table, and the boy felt himself fading
into a background of adult noise and conversation. The boy remembered Nino's truth inside
of him and he wondered what kind of truth it was, good or bad. What kind of truth?

He could feel the secret life of him running in his blood, racing around inside of him
and singing out for itself, hunting for somewhere to go but instead retracing the same
familiar pathways of the same familiar soul. The boy knew that this would be what the
world required of him from then on, and all he could do was hope that the feeling would
grow him up fast enough to endure it.